How we hacked the Bavarian State with an Open Source Open Letter Grazer Linuxtage 2026

In September, a few of us Open Source nerds heard that the Bavarian government wanted to "sneakily" "invest" another billion Euro in Microsoft Cloud, Teams and 365 – without a tender, and before the year ends (Base contract) I talked to friends, and we created an open letter. Soon we were like ten initiators. We found support among many Bavarian Open Source companies and NGOs, only weeks later > 160 companies and institutions had been signing the letter. When larger German NGOs like the Gesellschaft für Informatik (Society for Informatics) and the Bund der Steuerzahler (Tax Payers' Association joined, the Bavarian Government could not stay silent any more. Leading up of today, two secretaries and the minister president have engaged in a public blame game. At first they were angry about the unwanted, additional publicity - and publicly said so. The goal of sneakily accomplishing the deal until end of 2025 failed and it is still not finalized. But now - four weeks before an election, secretaries of state for digital and finance are fighting publicly, accusing each other of "fake news" and are saying silly things. On camera - and in parliament. "OSS is too expensive" or "We needed something federated, decentralized and secure, thus we had to go for MS 365" and similar. It's fun. What we can learn from this? PR for OSS works, timing is helpful, topics are important and claims like "ONE BILLION!!" are valuable. No one knew Trump, Greenland and Davos would come to help us, but they did and made it hard for the conservative Bavarian government to keep doing what they had always been. And we were a bunch of people that stuck it out. And it's so important that we the OSS community learn how to play against the lobbys. We need to apply the "divide and conquer" strategy against the real enemies, not internally.